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I am using Blender like for CAD-like work because it does what I want and the 25 CAD programs I tried do not.

I use Shift+S > Selection to Cursor a lot. Sometimes Blender moves the shared meshes of Unselected objects. How do I control whether Blender will move unselected objects' meshes (esp. make it stop)? I have been trying to learn to use objects created with Duplicate Linked, but if the object already exists, I switch its mesh to match.

I am regularly running into the problem of a lack of detailed information on Blender features—in this case, what linking does under the hood, which sometimes copies some attributes instead of connecting them. Is there a reference that is more in depth than the short doc pages? Perhaps for coders?

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  • $\begingroup$ When you change an object which mesh is linked to other objects in edit mode, it changes all occurences of the objects sharing the same mesh. I think you want to transform the linked objects in Object mode $\endgroup$
    – Gorgious
    Commented May 18, 2021 at 6:25
  • $\begingroup$ Everything I've done has been in Object mode. To the best of my knowledge, no action should be changing the location of unselected objects. Perhaps it is a bug, especially since Blender sometimes moves them and sometimes does not. $\endgroup$
    – GregJ7
    Commented May 18, 2021 at 12:44
  • $\begingroup$ Could you post an example with a few screenshots showing your interface ? $\endgroup$
    – Gorgious
    Commented May 18, 2021 at 14:53
  • $\begingroup$ @Gorgious, here is an even simpler example. Simply relocating the origin on an object moved the two objects that share the same mesh. Before and After. It might not be easily visible: I moved the origin from the back-right corner of the active rectanguloid to the front-right corner which caused the other two objects to move (in the directions marked with green arrows). $\endgroup$
    – GregJ7
    Commented May 18, 2021 at 15:58
  • $\begingroup$ Well, moving the origin of the object in object mode is similar to moving the meshes of the object in the inverse transformation in edit mode, so it's logical. Linked mesh share the same local matrix, and the same origin. If you tweak one's origin, they all get updated. Maybe you want SHIFT + D instead of ALT + D ? or you can parent the linked objects to empties and transform them instead $\endgroup$
    – Gorgious
    Commented May 18, 2021 at 16:05

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Thanks for the explanations. I will hunt down resources to explain what Blender thinks origins are, not to mention how it handles non-absolute world coordinate systems. I'm wondering if learning about "local" coordinates might help me, which I've seen reference to.

It seems unnecessarily confusing because at most times Blender pretends there are no absolute coordinates, which is bogus, since that is how it knows where to draw things relative to where it draws the X, Y, and Z axes. I could figure what Blender was doing in operations if there were a visible absolute reference for everything. I can't very well keep moving all objects' origins to their geometries to understand what an operation involving origins is doing.

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In my case I had accidentally turned on Proportional Object Editing causing transforms of object A to affect unselected object B. Toggle it off with O or with the icon at top center near Snap.

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